America 'Overreacted' To Pearl Harbor? Nonsense!

MY WORD

December 13, 1991|By Thomas Tybeck

Fifty years after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Sentinel's Insight section has seen fit to bring forth another sneak attack, this time on common sense. I refer to the recent article, ''A disaster for Japan - and the U.S.'' by Professor John Mueller.

Mueller says America overreacted to the bombing of Pearl Harbor by declaring war. Instead of war, the attack should have reinforced America's policy of containment against Japan, he writes. And while he praised the U.S. postwar policy of containing a belligerent Russia, he also suggested that in 1945, the United States, along with Japan and Germany as allies, might have considered a ''major war against'' Russia. That ''might very well have been successful,'' but at too great a cost, he says.

Can anyone who lived through that time - or even anyone who is well read - give credence to his idea about not going to war against Japan? I cannot. Who can contemplate a reaction in which Americans simply sat back on Dec. 8, 1941, and said, ''Well, it's too bad about those servicemen and the Pacific Fleet. We should strengthen our remaining defenses and contain those Orientals; but for heaven's sake, let's not provoke them!''

That type of thinking (appeasement) is the same mistake that the British, French and other Europeans made with Adolf Hitler. Der Fuehrer could have been easily stopped any time from 1933 to 1939 without tremendous bloodshed. Even when the Wehrmacht crossed the Polish border in September 1939, the Nazis would have been no match for the combined forces in Poland and France. But they were not stopped then because the Allies lacked the moral will and courage to act, even when it was in accordance with their own survival.

If Mueller's course had been followed, we could have lost not only Hawaii and Midway, but also the entire Central and South Pacific. New Guinea would have been overrun and Australia invaded. Perhaps then Japan would have stopped. Sure. Long enough to assimilate and exploit its vast new wealth and resources - to enslave, starve or work to death entire new populations. Great idea, isn't it?

Regarding Russia: Mueller raised the possibility that America might have reinvigorated and rearmed the prostrated Axis powers. Then we might have led this new triple entente against our former ally. While no one could admire their political system, the Russians had borne the main fury of the German onslaught. They acquitted themselves magnificently in the art of war.

In a conventional war against Russia, which had sustained 20 million dead and still came back to defeat the bulk of Hitler's army, we could not have prevailed. We, like a war-weary France in 1939, lacked the will to take on the tyrant whom we (or our government, as least) knew well and yet chose to call ''Uncle Joe.''

Mueller and those who think in a like manner would do well to remember that war is a continuation of a state's policy by other means. It was the unspoken U.S. policy in the late '30s and early '40s to stop fascist aggression. This we did, by war. Russia's emergence as a hostile superpower during the postwar years resulted from a combination of its national paranoia and the international policy blunders of the Roosevelt-Truman years.